


Roads Unwalked (Will Take You Nowhere)

by sphinxofthenile



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Project Brazil headcanon accepted, abundance of tribal identity markers, abuse of brackets and dashes, overabundance of Lonesome Road feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 19:37:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16604243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sphinxofthenile/pseuds/sphinxofthenile
Summary: Not for the first time, he thinks that someone of her history shouldn't look so ordinary, like just another human being. She should be ten feet tall, with flames for eyes and Howitzer barrage for voice, clad in bones and crowned in rad storms, born and bred in hellfire instead of a nation that could've uplifted the world.





	Roads Unwalked (Will Take You Nowhere)

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished Fallout New Vegas and this story burned its way out of my head like a bag of irradiated fire ants. Please send help.

_"A bridge has no allegiance to either side." --_ Les Coleman

 

{&}

 

"Courier," Ulysses acknowledges her flatly, but his eyes rake over her and narrow slightly.

He saw her coming, perched high on a rocky outcropping with a wide and devastating view of the Divide and the beaten dirt path leading up to it. Took her for a ghost at first, come back to haunt him. He watched her walk the trail like he had followed her steps so many times before. It feels different without the need to stay concealed. Daring, perhaps.

But ghosts don't trip and she did, turned from a lonesome apparition of the past to the Courier again. (She's been a ghost for so long, sometimes when the wind in the cracks howls just so beneath the red sky he questions if any of it was real. If she really came back to walk the ash and then leave home all over again.)

Her skin is chalk white, her hair loose and whipped by storm winds around her face, the shadows beneath her eyes so deep they look like bruises. She stumbles towards him haltingly as though in a daze -  as though it's nothing but sheer power of will keeping her on her feet.

She's the stubborn kind. Always was, always will be. Doesn't throw him anymore.

(If he still wore his braids the old way, like he perhaps should, she would be a wide one just behind his right ear - a place reserved for a worthy adversary, like the left is reserved for family, for a great love. A red string for blood spilled and a white one for conclusion weaving through it, with a coyote fang and a polished black deadwood bead added in along the length of it.)

"Ulysses," she whispers past chapped lips valiantly aiming for a grin, voice dry and gravelly, her eyes like the abandoned shafts of nuclear silos emptied into the sky, and then she crumples in front of him like Old World paper in a flame. (Like she's come and passed her final message with her last breath.)

It catches him off-guard, and he's not fast enough. The sound of her head hitting solid rock pricks at something inside him, wrapped neat and tight and tucked away carefully at the edges of his sanity. His fingers hover for a moment before he lets himself touch, breath catching, because this was never in their history, in their road. A fork in it, unwalked, unmapped.

(He had known, from the moment two couriers walked out of the Temple instead of one.)

Her eyes are closed but she's breathing, her forehead cool beneath his fingers. He cradles her head in his large hands, feels for blood in her hair, but there is no broken skin, just the beginnings of a bruise. No other wounds on her either, as far as he can tell, and he ignores the feeling slowly uncoiling inside his chest.

He slings her bag over his shoulder, then half-drags, half-lifts her into his arms. She is heavy against him, the truth and reality of her. (So much lighter to carry when she was still just a ghost, a whisper out of the desert, but carry her he will - like he carries the symbol on his back.)

 

{&}

 

He finds some black coffee in an old milk bottle in her duffle bag and not much else. Sips it cold and unsweetened with his back against the cliff and his other hand on his weapon. The night is getting uncomfortably cold against his skin, but he's spotted Marked Men across the canyon earlier, dares not make a fire.

His bedroll is wrapped tight around the Courier, her breathing finally evening into the slow-deep pattern of exhausted sleep. Her presence burns in his awareness like a red flare, like a branding iron over old scars. He wonders why she came, covered in the dust of the long walk and hollow desperation. Dreads the moment she will wake up and give him an answer. What news does she bring, this woman who changes the world?

He remembers the first time he saw her, looking too young for her chosen trade, too cocky to last long in it, too radiant for the wasteland she bloomed out of like a distant mirage that can only ever be chased but never reached. How he dogged her path, following the way of the setting sun. How he watched until he knew her shape, the unspoken language in the lines of her body. Until she was burned into the back of his eyelids like the afterimage of lightning. The pole star in the constellation he has aligned himself to, daring to hope again.

(If he had his braids then - not the ones that said Legion, said _true to Caesar_ \- she would've been a bead of dried pinyon nut caught on an overhand knot at the end, hanging past his shoulder and painted blue with skydust clay.)

Right now with shadow lying heavy against the angles of her face, she looks both familiar and not - fragile, almost, if the mere thought wouldn't make him scoff internally - nothing of the steel showing. Not for the first time, he thinks that someone of her history shouldn't look so ordinary, like just another human being. She should be ten feet tall, with flames for eyes and Howitzer barrage for voice, clad in bones and crowned in rad storms, born and bred in hellfire instead of a nation that could've uplifted the world.

It takes him a moment to catch the glint of eyes in the dark, realize she is awake and watching him back. (Strikes him with the foolish sense of being caught, found out.) Then he blinks and it's gone, easier to decide he must've imagined it.

 

{&}

 

She jolts awake with a wild, drawn-out scream that breaks against his palm. (He saw her twitch and whimper, and he is no stranger to nightmares, haven't been for a very long time.) She trashes wildly in his hold, back arched and eyes wide in blind panic.

"Stop it, stop," he hisses at her, but it comes out more of a low murmur, and the fight drains out of her in an instant like rainwater from a sieve. He takes his hand away and she sits up, pressing the heel of her hands against her eyes.

"Ulysses," she mutters, raspy with sleep, and he hands her the remaining coffee. She drinks it and shudders as the taste hits. "Thanks." He can see her take in the hollow they are camped at, working out the basics for herself. "Thank you," she says again, looking at him intently, and he nods, understands.

The first one was for coffee, this one - for everything else.

"Better?" He tosses her a bottle of water and she empties it in long, greedy gulps, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

"Fucking Deathclaws all over the pass to the Mile. Stimpaks are aces, but I could do with a blood pack," she pinches the bridge of her nose with a heartfelt groan.

"Reckless, Courier, even for you."

"Takes more than a few overgrown geckos. You should be one to know," she says with a grin that is not a grin at all. It's a show of teeth, savage and biting and strangely resentful. (Not aimed at him, he thinks. But then who?)

He nods again and busies himself with packing, lets the silence build between them.

She watches him with eyes that have seen far too many horrors, a whole new depth in them that makes him somehow uneasy. "It's done," she says so abruptly that it almost makes him flinch.

There is no point dancing around it, he knows that. "Could you be more specific, Courier?"

The crease of a small frown comes and goes between her eyebrows before she heaves a sigh, eyelids falling closed for a moment. "The Dam," she says, and he's guessed as much, waits for her to continue. As the silence stretches, he looks up only to find her staring at the sun rising above the Divide, old grief on her face, red light in her hair.

He thought he was ready for this, but there's something sharp and bitter in his heart, and suddenly he doesn't want to hear it.

(If he had ever become part of her nation like he wanted, as he had planned, she would've been a thin strand at his temple, tied with green weave and blended into a great Mesa twist, but that dream was cast into the ash of the Divide a long time ago.)

"Why did you come back?" he asks, and it rings out clipped and harsh.

"I remember," she swallows hard, eyes holding his, and he feels a freezing grip inside, a queasy weight in his stomach like swallowing lead. Her expression carves a wound in his side, to see her so raw and open, bone-tired and devastated. "Everything."

 

{&}

 

She stares at the Divide, but it feels like her voice still rings between them, unswept by the storm. She talked and he listened, his hands numb and his mouth filled with sand, read yet more in the silence between her words and the trembling of her lashes.

It keeps swirling inside him, this shapeless recollection of a mindless, blind crawl across the dust and debris mapped in her blood and tears, of mad grief and sand against bare bone. The ice pick of realization to the nape of her neck, a laceration of guilt in the shape of their names, of familiar ghosts that walk the long road with her and wear the faces of the dead. (He knows it all, can feel them staring, always staring, can still taste the blood and smell his own flesh burning. Sometimes, he dreams about it even when he is awake.)

Not a tribe of blood, but of circumstance and choice, sharing the same loss, the same fight. Bright, wayward girls, a tribal boy like a brother to her. (But could've been more, _was_ , perhaps, more.) The glint of a once-life in a still frame, buried in the wreckage beneath their feet. Not the first home, the first time, just the hardest.

She gives him a terrible, brave smile that makes his jaw clench. "Not much in the way of a good night's sleep recently, as you can imagine," she says, and the look in her eyes is bottomless and knowing.

It makes him wonder what else she sees, what more she reads in the lines of him, but he doesn't ask for fear that she might _answer_. His fingers itch to reach out, to touch, to let her know something he cannot find the words to speak because there is something tender in his chest, messy and painful like a bullet wound.

He'd wanted her dead, left the land to do it when he realized he couldn't carry that, couldn't bear the weight of it. (If he had, she would be a half moon braid at the top of his head, tied back into a knot with a piece of rattlesnake skin.)

He knows now that he's done worse, cracked her skull open on the rocks of the Divide and left it to the wind and the radiation. He's done what the Mojave could not, what the Bear and the Bull could not. (He's cut the knees of one who raised up and destroyed nations, and where exactly does that leave him, now? _Who_ does it leave him as? Untethered and chained all at once, a restless wraith haunting the ruins at the end of the world.)

"I thought that the ghosts of the Divide might make you remember. Wanted you to. Before." A cruel and selfish want born from pain, from the anger at the injustice of it. That he should shoulder the weight of it alone, carry yet another piece of lost history all by himself while she walked free of its burden. The  _envy_ of it burned worse than the flames, than the invisible fire in the graveyard of the Old World. It still puts a hitch in his breathing, a phantom tremor in his fingers, the bite and drag of these shackles that he will never be free of. "For that, I am sorry."

She gives a slow nod and there is something in her eyes that makes him wish it could've been different, somehow. Not this weary truce between them, but something better, something that wouldn't leave him feel so weathered and worn, and it is only when they set out towards Crow's Nest that he realizes that she still hasn't answered his question.

 

{&}

 

"Come back with me," she says, sitting cross-legged next to him on the floor of the silo they sought shelter in, sorting scraps from a sentry bot into neat piles.

For a moment he is convinced he's heard wrong, his eyes snapping up from his own work to meet hers, and then he knows better. So he blinks and does the only thing he can think of - laughs. It's a deep, humorless sound that falls back from the metal walls with a tinny echo that doesn't sound human at all.

She swallows but doesn't look away. Stubborn.

"Is that why you came? Followed the sun all alone?" he finally raises an eyebrow to cover the hollow ring to his voice.

"I came because I-- because they don't understand, Ulysses. They can't. They don't know the - why of things," she says the phrase with a sort of exasperated fondness that winds something tighter in his chest. "You told me to wear my symbol with pride, and I couldn't-- wasn't-- I had to choose before someone else chose for me. Before it was too late to pick that symbol and make it - history."

The implications hang heavy in the stale air, suffocating.

"Did you?" he finally asks when it becomes unbearable.

"Yes," she keeps looking at him, something in her eyes, something like pain, something like a plea, like hope. "An independent Vegas."

"You mean to turn the wall into a bridge," he realizes, something flaring in the cold ashes of his soul where he thought there were no embers left.

_An Old World wall, yet bridging two sides_ , those were his words to her. Neither Bear nor Bull, but something better, greater. A symbol meant for a flag, worthy of it. It seemed no more than a dream back then, impossible. He really shouldn't be so surprised that she somehow pulled it into being, gave it a shape that defies everything he thought he knew.

"I learned from you too," she gives him a small, lopsided smile, places a tentative hand on his.

His lips are pressed into a line taut with anger and shame and a fierce, bitter pride because she does - still, despite everything - make him want to grasp for that mirage, that promise in the distance, even though he should know better by now. It speaks to a part of him buried in the nuclear ash of a people, of a home he always fought for but never had. The siren song of a future so dearly loved but never lived, that left him hollow and scarred, consumed with vicious thoughts, twisting and gnawing and venomous.

So he does the only thing he can think of - he reaches over and kisses it right off her lips.

She will build a nation out of a desert and he will be there. (He will follow her like he did that first time, like he always did.) A new road, a new nation, a new history. Whatever her symbol, he will carry it, like he carries the one on his back. Forgotten histories teach no lessons, and roads unwalked will take you nowhere. So he will keep bearing the weight of them, not as shackles, but perhaps a torch, for others to see by.

Her presence is a warm weight in his awareness like a weapon in hand, like sun-heated stone against his back. (She is the wide braid just behind his left ear, with strings of red, white and blue, capped with a shining clasp made of a 9mm casing - a coyote fang, a polished black deadwood bead and a strip of green weave added in along the length of it.)

She smiles at him and he takes her hand, walks out of the Divide and doesn't look back.


End file.
